Whittle It a Little, It’ll Fit

Odds and sods I look at regularly, just because they amuse me. I hope they do the same for you. Incidentally, I found this page’s title on Greg Ross’s Futility Closet (it’s somewhere on this page) in a mini-article which also includes the delightful sentence in Icelandic: Barbara Ara bar Ara araba bara rabbabara. Ross points out that this, “besides being fun to say, is spelled with only three letters. It means “Barbara, daughter of Ari, brought only rhubarb to Ari the Arab.”

Futility Closet » Front Matter

Thursday 7 March 20:04:02 UTC 2024

David B. Lewis’ 1983 book Eureka!: Math Fun From Many Angles begins with this notice: Errata 1. There are no mistakes in this book. The above should read ‘Erratum.’ Is the correction a mistake or not? [Link]

Weird Universe » A case of hypervaccination

Thursday 7 March 12:32:00 UTC 2024

The Lancet reports on the case of a 62-year-old German man who received 217 Covid vaccinations over a period of 29 months. That works out to getting vaccinated approximately every four days.

When I got the Covid vaccine I felt for a day like I'd been run over by a truck. The German hypervaccinator, on the other hand, felt no … [Link]

Weird Universe » Mystery Gadget 109

Thursday 7 March 10:48:00 UTC 2024

What's it for?

The answer is here.

Or after the jump.

[Link]

Futility Closet » A Typographical Banknote

Thursday 7 March 8:05:10 UTC 2024

In 1819, as the Bank of England struggled against counterfeiters, T.C. Hansard proposed a note that combined such a variety of typefaces that a lone forger couldn’t hope to duplicate it — the faces descended all the way to Diamond, the smallest available, and the bottom of each note would be filled with 140 lines of fine print containing hidden … [Link]

John Gordon Ross

A Man for All Reasons